It isn’t easy to find foods that are gluten-free, especially if you are seeking pastries and other baked goods. This means it is time to try your hand at baking these treats yourself, from scratch. My husband and I recently made some delicious gluten-free lemon bars. Here is how we did that.
We are fortunate enough to have a lemon tree in our tiny little backyard. The tree produces fruit nearly all year round, probably because we live in sunny California. Earlier this week, we noticed that there were a ton of lemons that were ripe, and ready to be made into something delicious.
Usually, when we get enough lemons, we make lemonade. This time, there were still a lot of lemons left after the fresh squeezed lemonade was made. We decided that the first gluten-free pastry to make from all these lemons would be a nice batch of lemon bars.
First, we found a recipe online that gave us a good idea about what ingredients we would need. We modified the original recipe just a bit, in order to make it work better for us.
You will need:
1 cup of all purpose gluten-free flour.
We used Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose Baking Flour. It is gluten-free, wheat free, and dairy free.
1/2 cup of softened butter
1/4 cup of powdered sugar
We used the Safeway brand Confectioners Powdered Sugar.
2 eggs
1 cup of granulated sugar
We used Trader Joe’s Organic Sugar.
2 teaspoons of grated lemon peel
This came from the lemons from our tree.
2 tablespoons lemon juice
This also came from the lemons from our tree. We used a juicer to obtain the juice.
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
We used Rumford Aluminum-free baking powder.
1/4 teaspoon salt
Now that you have all the ingredients, here is what to do with them:
Step One: Heat the oven to 350 degrees.
Step Two: Mix the flour, butter, and powdered sugar into a bowl. Keep mixing it until it forms a dough. This will not take very long to do.
Step Three: Press the dough into an ungreased square pan. Make sure the dough goes all the way to the edges of the pan, and is fairly even. The best way that I found to do this was to put the dough into the center of the pan, and press it out using one’s fingers. The pan we used was 8”x8”.
Step Four: You are now ready to put the crust into the oven. Bake it for twenty minutes.
Step Five: Put the rest of the ingredients into a bowl, and mix them together. You want to keep beating the ingredients until there are no clumps and the mixture has become light and fluffy.
Step Six: When the crust is ready to come out of the oven, you will need to pour the light and fluffy mixture over the crust. Put the whole thing back into the oven for about 25 minutes.
When the timer goes off, you will need to set the lemon bars on top of the stove so they will cool. After that happens, you can easily cut the pan of lemon bars into lemon bar squares. We decided to sprinkle some powdered sugar over the top of the bars before cutting into them.
The results were delicious! My husband said that if someone handed him one of these lemon bars, without telling him that they were gluten-free, he never would have guessed it. We are going to make these again sometime soon!
Image by queenofhaiku on Flickr